Light Bearer

[Darth Carnifex]

​

​

Kaine Zambrano's Secluded Personal Estate
Sartinaynian (Bastion)

When [member="Isley Verd"] first struck out to make his mark upon the galaxy the Braxant sector would soon fall under his banners, with the former Imperial world of Bastion becoming a principle fortress world for the nascent Crusaders. It wouldn't be long before the Dark Lord Carnifex turned his gaze towards the planet, and in secret he consorted with Isley Verd, his son-in-law, to commission the construction of a palace hidden deep within the uninhabited highlands far away from Ravelin or any other populated settlement. This allowed the Dark Lord to keep in frequent contact with his son-in-law despite the enmity directed towards the Sith by the ravenous Crusaders, and had remained undiscovered ever since.

However; the landscape of galactic politics was beginning to sway in the wake of the Sith Reclamation of the Stygian Caldera, and the Silver Jedi's inability to reign in those who fought under their banner. Word had reached the Dark Lord that a delegation of Crusaders, led by [member="Keira Ticon"], had attempted to meet with the Silver Jedi leadership in an attempt to ensure the execution of the individual who committed the willful bombardment of Korriban City during the Reclamation. The talks went immediately sour and the Crusader entourage left Voss with an indignant huff.

Keira Ticon was the Dark Lord's daughter-in-law by marriage to his son [member="Slade Zambrano"], and their relationship had been incessantly violent ever since their little squabble on Deneba. The Dark Lord needed to mend such fractious wounds, and so as a showing of trust and faith had sent an invitation to Keira to meet with him privately on his aforementioned secret estate on Bastion. She would be allowed to keep whatever weapons and armor she brought if she so wished, and while the Dark Lord didn't plan for a fight he wouldn't deprive a warrior of her bread and butter.

Again, another show of faith.

He would wait for her at the tallest tower that jutted from the star fort that comprised the foundation of the structure. For convenience a docking bay had been built one level below the tower's apex, allowing for any ship given access to dock directly with the tower and reach the atrium instead of trudging through the labyrinthine structure below.

 

[Keira Priest]

It wasn't the invitation that Keira mulled over the most, but rather what weaponry to bring. Her armor was an obvious choice, as was her two lightsabers. Eventually she had settled on Akaa'gai as well, along with Kalso's Revenge. The rifle was too cumbersome for an affair like this, and better fit for the literal battlefield besides. What she decided on was enough to dictate that this wasn't necessarily a social call, and it communicated her distrust and ultimate dislike of the Sith, and that was enough. The last time she had convened with her father-in-law had been on the formerly Republic-held world of Deneba, and that clash had only cemented their relationship as a violent one, and admittedly not much of anything at all.

Within the next few hours she had set off for Bastion, brushing off any inquiries simply by explaining that there were still Primeval remnants to dispose of. This was something she wanted to handle by herself, and so it was better that no others knew of just who she would be meeting with. Kaine Zambrano was a man she knew full well couldn't be trusted, so it benefited her people in the long run that she deal with the brunt of things. Of course, Thalia had given her opinion.
"You're telling me you're going to go talk with a Sith Lord. How well did speaking with the Jedi go, again?"
"At the very least I don't have to feel bad if I end up killing a Sith."
"So you really don't want conflict with the Jedi."
"I've not taken it off the table."

When the transport settled in the docking bay she remained within for a few minutes, knowing full well this wasn't her wisest choice but being aware that it was too late to turn back. If she hadn't come in the first place, well, Sith Lord's weren't the greatest at taking rejection. Eventually she disembarked, the ramp sealing behind her. A hologram of her AI manifested in the upper right corner of her HUD, arms crossed. "I'm not letting you go off alone this time. I've learned my lesson about what happens when you're left to your own devices." It was difficult denying that Thalia had a point, especially when she was sometimes half the reason Keira bothered applying any amount of strategy to certain scenarios.

Armored footsteps echoed slightly in the expansive corridors of the estate, but she didn't allow herself to be swayed with the display of wealth and power. All of that was secondary to an individual's actions. There were none present to greet her, and it seemed she was to make the trip alone. Thankfully the difficulty didn't amount to much, given that all she had to do was follow her ethereal senses in order to locate the man of the hour. Progress halted when she stood in the same room as the giant, and after a few seconds she spoke, "I didn't take you as one to make social calls."

[member="Darth Carnifex"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

He turned slowly, meticulously, to face [member="Keira Ticon"] as she strode into the antechamber bristling with weapons, armor, and all sorts of gadgets like it was a war zone she was strolling into rather than a sparsely furbished room at the top of a tower. Compared to Keira the Sith Lord was practically naked in terms of attire, a simplistic robe of rough zeyd-cloth hung from his muscular frame while an ornate durasteel cuirass hugged his chest. A quick analysis of his person would reveal that other than his lightsaber he did not possess any other weapon, complicated armor, or fancy gadgets. His hair was bound back in a low ponytail, and his beard was less unruly and more symmetrical and neat. His eyes, sulfuric with flecks of emerald, washed over Keira like a butcher sizing up a piece of meat on the slab, but the smile that parted his lips was infinitely more warm than his cruel stare.

"Only when necessity demands it." He didn't deign to advance closer in the event it might be misconstrued as an act of aggression, so he firmly held his ground with his attention firmly fixated on the woman behind the armor rather than the armor itself. "You truly didn't need all of the gizmos, ad'ika. I never intended to start a fight with you, I didn't want this meeting to devolve into that chit show on Deneba."

Still, he didn't blame her for the precautions. It's what he would've done if he were in her circumstances.

 

[Keira Priest]

For a moment she didn't deign to respond, simply taking in his form without the armor that she had first seen him in. Nothing about him had changed expressly, though this was the first time Keira had looked upon her father-in-law's true countenance, and not the one the helmet of his armor bore. Wordlessly she reached up to release the seal of her helmet, pulling it off and clipping it magnetically at her side, running her fingers through her hair almost absently. Dark eyes met evenly with his own, the gesture not one of defiance as it had been in the past but rather a sign that she wasn't threatened by him and that perhaps she even held some kind of respect for him as a fellow warrior. After all, he had proven his worth before.

"Necessity." She couldn't help the wry smile that twisted her lips at the word, as she had called the meeting with the Silvers out of necessity as well. One only had to look how those had transpired to see where that had gotten her. But that wasn't the concern at the moment. What was, however, was the Dark Lord of the Sith who was consequently her family wanting to do nothing more than supposedly hold a conversation. After a moment she took a few steps forward so that the two were within proper conversational distance. Not quite closing the gap to what she would consider personal space, but displaying some show of trust that this wouldn't spiral immediately out of control like she had initially anticipated.

The single word uttered in Mando'a sparked her attention, and she looked up at him with a crooked smile. "You still need to work on your accent, buir." There was more of an exotic purr to her tone when she spoke the language, one that hinted she had picked it up from a native speaker rather than learning via the HoloNet or other texts. A single brow raised when he implored he wasn't here to instigate conflict, and her initial silence was more than telling as to her thoughts on that particular claim. "Denba was...interesting, we'll say. Your reputation precedes you on the battlefield, but I'm afraid I do have to say I've fought people both bigger and stronger than you are. You're not quite the worst, but you come close." It was nothing more than idle conversation on her part, there being no barbed remarks disguised behind her words.

"You'll have to forgive me if I've learned to take precautions. I've been called to meet with Sith before and on occasion gone with them voluntarily, and I'm sure you can guess about how far that got me." Someone like her learned easily and quickly that paranoia bred survival more often than not. Better to be overly cautious than not at all, especially when dealing with an enemy you'd clashed with on multiple battlefields and nearly died at the hands of more than you would have liked. "I wouldn't say I want this to dissolve into a fight, but I wouldn't mind there being a second chance in the grand scheme of things. I like to think I've grown since then. Or at the very least learned when to withhold restraint."

Taking in a breath she released it in a quiet sigh, finding herself glancing about the room before her gaze once again settled on the man before her. "I can't imagine you called me here to discuss any kind of alliance with the Crusaders. You don't strike me as that ignorant." She watched him for a moment. "I am assuming, however, that you've heard about Voss and the Jedi." It was only natural to think that was what this was all about.

[member="Darth Carnifex"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

He chuckled, "Don't get too ahead of yourself, Keira. I wasn't aiming to kill you on Deneba, only to prevent you from attacking me further. My true enemy was the Republic and their decadent lap dogs, you just had the unfortunate luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time." He snapped the fingers of his right hand, prompting a side-door on the far wall to open sharply to allow a Z2 Hegemonic Automaton servant droid entry into the chamber. In one of its many arms it carried a tray of bottles each containing a different colored liquid ranging from a bright emerald to a dark brown, the bottles kept upright by the droid's gyroscopic systems. In another hand he held a tray of drinking glasses, all of them made from glass and garishly ornate. The droid puttered through the air before coming to a stop somewhere between the two of them and extended a glass to both.

"I assumed you'd be thirsty after such a long trip, so I had my servitor arrange some refreshments for the both of us." The droid then enunciated the individual drinks that he held in his possession starting with the bottle filled with a bright green liquid. "Absinthe." He then gestured to the bottle filled with a light red liquid, "Mandalorian Wine." Finally he acknowledged the third and final bottle that contained a brown liquid, "Corellian Whisky."

Kaine naturally partook of a glass of licorice-flavored absinthe, the droid pouring him a glass first before turning to await Keira's decision on a drink if she deigned to have one at all. "The Mandalorian Wine was a gift from [member="Isley Verd"], it's quite bitter but satisfying. But to the matter of why I invited you here. Yes, it does pertain to your failed meeting with the Silver Jedi over the Korriban incident, and I can sense that you had a particularly nasty run-in with that oaf Harrison. The Silvers will always be unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, even now they lay the root of the problem at our feet. If the Silvers hadn't disrespected the ancient tombs of our ancestors we would not have had to drive them away, just look at what happened when one of their commanders was faced with the pressure of battle. Shameful."

[member="Keira Ticon"]​

 

[Keira Priest]

A glass of Corellian whisky was her choice, not that it should have surprised anyone that so much as claimed to know her. "I seem to have had that luck the majority of my life." Keira took a pull of her drink, seeming to mull over the flavor for a moment before she continued, "I can't help but wonder if this meeting falls under that category as well." The comment was made offhand and seemingly entirely innocently, but the raised eyebrow as she looked to her father-in-law would betray the opposite. It was her method of combat without drawing a single weapon, though not commentary made entirely maliciously. This back-and-forth was how she entertained herself, along with how she gauged her ability to perhaps get along with an individual.

"The talks with the Silvers went about as well as I anticipated. While I didn't expect them to be amicable to our form of justice, I did think they would display more common sense than they did. Force forbid we don't protect the life of a war criminal." That alone made evident her thoughts on the incident, though just a glance to what had happened on Voss would reveal as much. There was no doubt in her mind that the Crusaders and the Jedi would butt heads later down the line, but she was doing her best to prevent that despite what any outsiders looking in would think. Everything recently had more or less just been collateral of the Korriban incident and the consequences that would inevitably follow something of that scale.

Taking another drink, she nodded. "In that we for the most part agree. While I won't bother getting into the semantics of things between the Jedi and Sith, we can agree that the Jedi rarely take full responsibility, nor do they do anything productive to solve the problem when they have a direct opportunity to do so." The Silver Jedi had already proven that themselves, and she didn't expect them to willingly shift their supposed moral compass anytime soon. The Jedi were anything if not persistent and endlessly stubborn in being grounded in their superficial and ultimately meaningless Code. Or at least, that was the opinion she had developed over the years of having to deal with their various sects.

Mention of the clash with Connor still managed to draw a crooked smile from her, the memory of his broken form still drawing some form of amusement from her. "He and I had a...talk." That was the tamest way to describe what had spiraled into a violent clash that ended with him crippled at her feet. "It ended with his ribs and collarbone broken, his hand and kneecap crushed, and the bones in his legs shattered. The Jedi had their message sent to them multiple times over by the end of things. They know not to mess with us, and I don't anticipate them having the gettse to do anything about it. Not with how keen they are on preserving life."

[member="Darth Carnifex"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

Again, another laugh. "You should've killed Harrison, Keira. It would've saved us a lot of trouble in the long run." He took a sip of his drink, letting the emerald liquid settle on his tongue before swallowing. "The Silvers have proven themselves incompetent at every junction, unwilling to dispense real justice while hiding behind their shield of higher morality. The upcoming trial for the Butcher of Korriban, this [member="Charzon Loulan"], will be nothing more than a sham, a farce. At best she'll get a slap on the wrist and languish in some prison, at worst the Jedi will delude themselves into thinking they can rehabilitate her and let her walk free. If I had any say in the matter the wretch would've been been strung up outside of the city she so callously bombarded, her skin peeled and her bones shattered."

There was no nonsense when it came to Carnifex's harsh, draconian "justice". He valued himself as judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one and didn't put much value into due process, lengthy trials, or hearing out the defense of the accused. Where he ruled his judgement was law, and the law punished transgressors no matter who they were or what they had done.

All who dared to disregard his will suffered the same fate.

"I am still surprised you attempted to come to an agreement with them after Korriban, they look down upon the Mandalorians just as they do the Sith. They also just so happen to wrongfully occupy ancient Sith territory, worlds that they have no right treading upon. We stemmed their expanse into the Caldera for now, but I have no doubt that they will try again and again. I doubt that the Mandalorian people would so willingly align themselves with the boogymen of the galaxy, especially after Ra's fetish with crusading, but always remember that the Sith have always been willing to pay for your services more often than the Jedi have."

[member="Keira Ticon"]

 

[Keira Priest]

There was nothing more than a single shake of her head. "No. Killing him wouldn't have solved anything, in the long run. There doesn't need to be a war. The Jedi just need to know where they stand, and that's the case, now." A part of her had warred with that idea for awhile, and she had been a hair's breadth away from killing him back on Vaal. Eventually she had come to terms with her own reasoning. "I know the trial isn't going to be much fo anything. That much was evident from the moment this whole thing was pinned on them to begin with. I suppose a part of me likes to believe that they're willing to do what needs to be done in order to avoid a war, but even then I know I'm expecting too much."

Her brow knotted slightly when his idea of 'justice' came into play, it evident that wasn't something she agreed with. "There isn't a need to make a show of it. Just put a bullet in her head and be done with it. To so much as propose a trial in this case is a joke. But whatever makes the Jedi feel better about their morality." Keira raised her glass to her lips, even the burn of the alcohol doing little to wash away her disgust at the thought of the so-called 'justice' of the Jedi prevailing. If she had it her way the entirety of it would have been done and over with the moment the woman was apprehended, but instead she had been allowed to live for far too long already.

"There was no agreement proposed. It was an ultimatum, and one they refused. What happens next will be decided by the outcome of this trial." When it came to the supposed trespassing on old Sith worlds, she only scoffed slightly and shook her head. "You should know by now my thoughts on your people. What conflict you have with the Jedi is none of my concern. The two of you can tear yourselves apart for all that I care, and myself and my people will contend with what's left." That had been the plan in the first place as far as she was concerned, and the Crusaders had more important issues to begin with. What came of the long-standing war between the dark and the light didn't worry her, the only real issue being who would be left once it was all over.

"The crusade has come to an end with the fall of the One Sith. But I'm hoping you don't honestly expect my people to offer their services to you so willingly after all that has transpired between us. We're mercenaries, certainly, but Mandalorians aren't awfully good at forgetting."

[member="Darth Carnifex"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

"And which transgression is that? The one where your people broke a treaty between themselves and the Sith to initiate a planet-wide holocaust on Dromund Kaas which left billions of civilians dead or displaced, or when the Mandalorians dropped a Leviathan on Empress Teta and let it kill and devour seventy-five percent of the capital city's population. Or were you referring to the Imperial-Mandalorian Wars which came of the then Mandalore's unwillingness to engage us in diplomacy and routinely raided our borders to indiscriminately rape and pillage? Oh, now I remember. You refer to the Imperial reaction to your people's crimes against ours when we invaded your territory and laid waste to Junction and Concord Dawn, a move which pushed you into bed with the Jedi Order which insofar seems to persist to this day."

He had raised his voice during this tirade, his drink forgotten. "You turn your nose up at the Sith and claim that because of what we did to your people in the past you're incapable of working with us, yet by my calculations you've killed more civilians than I have in my entire career as a Sith Lord. Where you grimace as Republic and Silver war criminals are routinely let off the hook or given outrageously light sentences you are never willing to prosecute those war criminals within your own ranks."

He took a step back, ruffling out the wrinkles in his garb before composing himself. "But in the wake of the frequent Mandalorian hypocrisy I have attempted numerous times to work together with your own people to achieve greater goals, [member="Isley Verd"] and I have always been of the same mind about the nature of the galaxy and the Force. Even as Warmaster him and I continue to see eye-to-eye, which is why I've been willing to extend my trust to you despite our past squabbles or disagreements. The Sith and the Mandalorians have more in common with each other than they do with the Jedi, Keira, never forget that."

[member="Keira Ticon"]​